junkmail for blankets

time is the wine being drunk

catching a jet plane all over the place at 5 am. until i'm back at a computer, here's another from the rehearsal dinner vault, which i remembered when i thought about flying. names changed, as always. and sorry for the dart imagery repetition. the dart is worth it.

click below to read about kansas, shih tzus, and adam and eve.

::

William,

I love you. You are not the Bible-trumping Oxfordite egomaniac I expected to strut into the RUF house. You managed, rather, to slouch into the house. Your new-backpack-wearing, pencil-box-toting first-day-of-school enthusiasm was trumped by your sickness for home. And how you proved your humanity to me when you broke down and returned South the next day, only to keep from drowning in your new home. And how you asked me to love you when you hugged me on your return. We act out what we cannot speak.

Unwarranted coffeeshop study breaks; running the seminary late at night in Bad Andy’s room; frisbee golf; teenage melodramas; lessons on interior decoration; failed romances all-but-one; 3D fashion sessions; the original Covenant drive-in – three years later, and I wonder if I could trade it all just to be back in that first embrace.

Kate,

I like to tell myself I saved this marriage. Well, apart from sovereignty and providence and wisdom and other Bible-ish words; yes, and apart from my melodramatic recasting of events and William’s good sense. So maybe I didn’t save the marriage, but William took my romantic advice once in his life, and he made a beautiful decision that moment of his life, and I am learning to love you for being the object of a sovereign, providential, wise, melodramatic, sensible, romantic, beautiful choice, for choosing, yourself, to be the wife of one whom I do love. To help me in this loving, I like to tell myself I saved this marriage. This means two things: One, I am becoming one of those meddling spinsters at the age of 27, and male. Two, I learn to love more quickly over invitations for dinner.

Family and friends,

I have recently graduated seminary. Now unemployed and unmarketable, I question my years of study. I seek out funerals and irrational coffee-shop discussions and rehearsal dinners to validate my schooling. Please, suffer me to preach for a moment, and minister to the almost-minister.

Our hearts are paper-thin, and, against, we assume, a better wisdom, we think we are running out of time. We are chasing love to death, and we are dying for it. I chased it out to Hesston, Kansas in February.

I drove across Kansas to pick her up: a 38-year-old Dodge Dart; 28,000 original old-lady driven miles; chrome and blue dash with AM radio and push-button transmission, like stainless clouds.

The wind reached across the highway at 55 miles an hour. A man with a voice like a cartoon father announced, on WAXE radio, that the big report would come after the break. I endured commercials for laxatives and a technical college to hear the “big report.” Matter-of-factly, like the lady who takes driver’s license pictures, the cartoon-father voice began reading off a list of 40 animals, mostly cats and small dogs, that were missing from their homes, and he read off a list of 40 animals, mostly cats and small dogs, that had been found at homes not their own. Apparently, the wind had ungrounded them and sent them hurtling across Kansas. And, apparently, this kind of thing happens all the time, but who knew?
I took her to a garage to have the oil changed. Earvin, the head mechanic, and his mechanic buddies huddled around the engine, like Macbeth’s giddy witches, or like they were calling for a halfback option right. They loved the car. A man at the gas station struck up a conversation with me regarding the headlights. Elderly people and generally amused folks craned their necks from their cars to get a better look. People love my car. Thus, people must love me. Or so I hope. I’m dying for love.

The next month, as I felt the paper beginning to separate, the fibers unwind, I felt hope. The girl I picked out in the waiting area actually sat next to me on the plane. We didn’t get married – in fact, she was a lesbian – but it was the first time the girl I picked actually sat next to me. Nowadays, I think I’ll meet my wife on an airplane, and she will love me like crazy. I’m dying for it.

I did not learn these things in seminary, nor have you, William, but we have learned of a better wisdom, and we are ashamed at our melodrama and guilty of faithlessness. And we cry out, “Who will love me,” whether single still or preparing to wed, and the shame and the guilt, they are our hearts’ sickness for home, for a marriage bed without condition, without stain, without blemish.

Though you’ll be reciting words tomorrow, you’ll be acting out something bigger, acting out this Homesickness for all of us. We act out what we cannot speak. Tomorrow, you and Kate will be baptized into each other – drenched with the grace of commitment and whispers and the moan of a beauty that points you both to your better home. Tomorrow, you will grace us with ceremony, and the ceremony is not sacrament, but the marriage is, and ever shall be, sacramental, flesh and blood, drowning and rising. You will act out what you cannot speak.

William, Kate, you are dying for love, and maybe you think you have been running out of time. And I think you’re right, and time ushers in timelessness, and who knows what beauty awaits you? Even tomorrow, and even next week, in Hawaii, you’ll be a cat and a small dog, ungrounded and winded, hurtling around an island; God loves you, he is pleased with you, he cares for you, and what he does not speak, he acts out by ungrounding you and sending you hurtling across the landscape, unexpectedly, breathlessly, arousingly, on your way, together, to a better home – leaving and cleaving.

And people have and will tell you that your ideas are ideals, that the rest of the marriage ain’t no honeymoon, that marriage becomes mundane and you learn to live with it. These people have turned their radios off, stopped listening for the wind, stopped expecting retrievers and shih-tzus to dart across their yards, headlong, tongue out, wondering where they’ll end up next. They’re trying to hold on to time. They have forgotten Adam’s first words, the first of the only words he could get out upon his marriage to Eve: “Zot Ha Pa’am” – “this is the time.” William, Kate, this is the time – eat it, drink it. The mundane is sacrament, time is the wine being drunk, and you are loved. Do not take that grace for granted. Do not forget these things. Rejoice. And I’ll be over for dinner in a few weeks.

Posted by ghetto monk at March 17, 2004 10:57 PM | TrackBack